A lot of people say the whole thing — the poker tables for sale in supermarkets, the proliferation of Texas Hold'em tournaments, the way poker supplies flew off the shelves this Christmas season even in Salt Lake City — started with a man whose improbable name is Chris Moneymaker.
Moneymaker is the Ken Jennings of poker, an ordinary guy who won big in front of millions of TV viewers, in Moneymaker's case $2.5 million on the World Series of Poker on ESPN in 2003. A year and a half later it's now possible to watch poker on TV sometimes eight hours a day: Celebrity Poker, World Poker Tour Ladies' Night, even reruns of 11-year-old poker games, with NBC planning to air the two-hour finale of Poker Superstars right before the start of the Super Bowl in February.
The TV coverage has turned poker into the pet rock of 2004, as mainstream as Uno. "Poker paraphernalia is about the hottest item that we're carrying this Christmas," said Smith's Marketplace spokesperson Marsha Gilford. "It's flying out of the store as fast as we get it in." At least one local Albertson's featured poker supplies at the front of the store this Christmas, along with Tonka trucks and inflatable snowmen.
On the one hand, poker is just a card game. On the other hand, its history and structure are all about betting, so all this newfound popularity has some addiction experts worried. It's also causing heartburn among government officials in Utah, one of two states in the country where gambling is still illegal but where poker games and poker tournaments are flourishing nonetheless.
Take the case of Diamond Poker Tour, run by Shawn Moore, Josh Colledge and Doug Baker of Ogden. On Tuesday, Dec. 14, after getting a Salt Lake City permit for a "card room," and buying 12 ads in the Salt Lake Tribune, the partners opened a Texas Hold'em poker tournament at the Salt Palace Convention Center.
No sooner had players started settling in at the oblong poker tables, however, Salt Palace officials showed up asking everybody to pack up and leave. The tournament is illegal, the Ogden men were told, even though the Salt Palace had signed a contract with them two weeks before. According to Salt Palace general manager Allyson Jackson, the convention center made its move after the Utah Attorney General's office called county and city prosecutors, who in turn called Salt Palace lawyers.
So Diamond moved the tournament one block south, to the Shilo Inn. "We crossed 200 South, which is the new state line," they explained wryly a few days later in a small meeting room at the Shilo, where they had set up some of their tables.
If the tournament was OK at the hotel — if no police showed up to arrest them — what does that mean, the men wanted to know. Is poker illegal in the county-owned Salt Palace but legal everywhere else? Or, conversely, if poker is really illegal everywhere, what about church raffles and bingo and charity casino nights? If everything is illegal, predicts Colledge, "they'll have to triple their police force."
"They're going to have to make a decision, one way or the other, because it's so popular," he says. "Every week some new guy comes up with a (poker) tournament."
Meanwhile, the Diamond partners are planning to sue the county for lost revenues.
Tournaments like theirs really aren't gambling anyway, the partners argue, because of their rules: you pay $75 to play one "table" and $25 for each additional hand, but you don't win anything except the chance to play in the final round. There are chips involved, of course, but the chips aren't worth anything. And, technically, anyone can play in the final round, without ever paying an entry fee, "if there is room at the tables." Moore pointed to two signs taped to the sign-in table: "Understand that by playing cards with us that you do not expect to win any prizes of value," and "There is no purchase necessary to win any of our prizes."
The signs do not impress Salt Lake County District Attorney Dave Yocom. "Your motivation is to move on to win prizes at the next stage," he insists. The no-purchase-necessary is "obviously just a front," he says.
Texas Hold'em tournaments, raffles, slot machines, office pools, bingo, home poker games with betting, charity casino nights, online poker — in Yocom's reading of the law they're all equally illegal in Utah. The poker tournaments were the subject of a November meeting of county attorneys throughout the state, Yocom says. "We're concerned it's running rampant."
"Risking anything of value to win anything of value on a game of chance" is the way Yocom defines gambling. That "something of value" doesn't mean just cash, notes assistant state Attorney General Tom Roberts. "If you bet a can of spaghetti, that has value. If you're paid off in cans of green beans, that has value."
That's not how Dean Brown thinks the law is interpreted. "As long as you play for prizes and don't play for cash" it's legal, says Brown, a former Weber State University student, about the tournament he has run at Weber State's Union Building. As with most poker tournaments, there is no betting but there is a "buy-in," in this case $30 ($25 with a student ID). The WSU tournament is one of 38 listed on homepokergame.com, a list that also includes a Wasatch Poker Tour tournament held at the University of Utah Union Building earlier this month.
The fact that both schools are state-run, and that Salt Lake County allowed a different Texas Hold'em tournament at the county-run South Towne Expo Center just a week before it sent Diamond Poker Tour packing from the Salt Palace, underscores both how mainstream poker has become, and how confusing it is to sort out the legal ramifications.
"Everyone would agree that gambling in the state of Utah is illegal," says Salt Lake City prosecutor Sim Gill. "Whether a particular event meets the element of gambling is a case-by-case analysis." That analysis ends with a screening of the facts by a prosecutor's office, but begins with a gathering and investigation of those facts by a law enforcement entity.
"We need some clarification about the words in the (gambling) statute," says Sgt. Frank Ziebert of the Salt Lake County Sheriff's office. In the meantime, due to budget cuts, the sheriff's office doesn't have a vice unit anymore.
Sandy city attorney Walter Miller says that police have investigated several poker games in Sandy in the past couple of months. The city handed out a zoning citation to a car dealer who had sponsored a poker tournament and who told Miller that poker enthusiasts may try to get a bill brought before the Legislature to clarify the gambling statute.
Sandy is home to at least two night clubs that promote Texas Hold'em tournaments. "I told the (Sandy) police chief 'Just go down with plainclothes men and turn on the lights.' If you did that at some of these places people would stop coming." Under Utah law it is a Class B misdemeanor to provide or participate in illegal gambling. In Yocom's opinion, clubs that offer a round of tournament poker for the price of a dinner violate the law. The dinner is just a gimmick, he says. "That's the same old game as the bingo parlors."
Although bingo parlors have been around for decades, last spring West Valley police served a search warrant at Annie's Dinner and Bingo Club after conducting an undercover investigation for several months; more than 20 gaming machines were seized. The case is pending in 3rd District Court.
West Valley Police have looked into a couple of places that advertise poker tournaments, says Lt. Dale Brophy, head of the department's investigations division. "We're definitely not ignoring it, but there's nothing out here that warrants us to actively investigate," he says, adding that the prizes and buy-ins are small. The matter has been forwarded to city attorney Ryan Robinson. "We haven't made a decision yet how or if to approach the situation," Robinson says.
In addition to poker tournaments there are hundreds of regularly scheduled home games where players both pay to play and also bet money, says Robert S., who 18 months ago started a Web site called UtahPlayers.com. That doesn't count all the more casual "nickel-and-dime" poker games in family rooms across the valley.
Robert, who considers poker more about mathematics than luck, prefers not to have his last name printed in the newspaper because "I host a game, and frankly, it's illegal, no ifs, ands or buts." At his games, players sometimes win $100 a night, he says, but there are also games in the Salt Lake valley where a night's winnings can reach $30,000, says Diamond Poker Tour's Colledge.
The new popularity of poker worries people like Keith Whyte, executive director of the nonprofit National Council on Problem Gambling. "We know that most gambling is not harmful, just like most people can drink without harm." But he worries that the TV poker shows glamorize gambling and fail to acknowledge its pitfalls. The games should come with the equivalent of a warning label, he says. The Council has put together a 30-second public service announcement and offered it to the channels that feature poker, but none has aired it.
Whyte and others worry that poker shows on TV will create a new generation of addicted gamblers. "We believe that poker is particularly attractive to youth," he says. "And the earlier you start gambling the more likely you are to have a gambling problem."
An anonymous member of the Salt Lake City chapter of Gamblers Anonymous says some of the group's newer members started their gambling addictions after watching poker on TV. "It's mostly younger people, who started envisioning themselves as world class poker players, then they got into Internet poker . . . and now their relationships are suffering because of the amount of money they gambled and then lost," he says.
Home poker parties may start innocently enough, says Ken Godfrey, co-owner of Casino Games and Bingo Supplies. "They start with penny ante. Then the conflict grows. It's a man thing," he says. "We've seen that happen repeatedly. The greed factor comes in, then feelings get hurt. It starts out as penny, nickel, dime, and then the game grows into dollars and pretty soon money that should have been spent doing something else for the family gets used up by dad at his friendly neighborhood poker night."
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com